Scott Cairns > Quotes

“May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.”
― Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain

“I turned and beheld seven rows of plasma screens, each bearing seven vivid scenes, each flickering, each pulsing with a light revealing distant terrors, conflagrations, sufferings - and all thereby brought so close, and all thereby kept far away.”
― Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

“He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay.”
― Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

“Centuries of dire prophecy have taught us all to be, well, unconvinced. And there have been decades, entire scores of years when, to be frank, wholesale destruction didn’t sound so bad, considering. You remember, we were all disappointed. That the world never ended meant we had to get out of bed after all...”
― Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected

“Regardless of our situations, we are inevitably partaking of something or other at every moment. The catch is that we will either partake of what is , or we will partake of the absence of what is. We partake either of life (all that has true being by way of its connection to God) or of death (all that has opted to sever that connection).”
― Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain

“God is, finally, unknowable. Still, while he is not to be absolutely known, he is apparently willing to reveal something of himself to us at nearly every turn. Think of it like this: he cannot be exhausted by our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested. He cannot be comprehended, but he can be touched.”
― Scott Cairns, God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas

“Recreation

And when we had invented death,
had severed every soul from life
we made of these our bodies sepulchers.
And as we wandered dying, dim
among the dying multitudes,
He acquiesced to be interred in us.
So when He had ascended thus
into our persons and the grave
He broke the limits, opening the grip,
He shaped of every sepulcher a womb.”
― Scott Cairns

“Theology is a distinctly rare, a puzzling study, given that its practitioners are happiest when the terms of their discovery fall well short of their projected point; this is where they likely glimpse their proof.”
― Scott Cairns, Idiot Psalms: New Poems

“Even the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut

Only the poor—who are with us always—only they continued in the hope.”
― Scott Cairns, Philokalia

“The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time.”
― Scott Cairns, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems

“Sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.”
― Scott Cairns, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems